7 key initiatives

Incognito launched its mainnet in November 2019. We believe that at this foundational stage, implementing the following 7 initiatives will provide the most value to the community.

These foundational building blocks will enable a thriving community of users, validators, and developers to build many new privacy-first products for this new world of cryptonetworks.

Initiative 1: Bring incognito mode to every cryptoasset

As crypto is eating the world, it is not far fetched to estimate that cryptoassets will increasingly compose an individual’s net worth or a company’s balance sheet. Incognito hopes to give these new assets and their owners - both now and in the future - the option to claim their right to privacy.

We’re focused on building as many trustless bridges as possible, so that people can confidentially send and receive cryptoassets like BTC, ETH, DAI, and USDT.

1 The development of the trustless bridge between Binance Chain and Incognito is funded by Binance.

Initiative 2: Bring incognito mode to every crypto activity

Right now, thousands of developers all over the world are programming smart contracts to build decentralized applications (commonly known as “dapps”). Arguably, privacy concerns play a part in discouraging adoption beyond the crypto niche, as traditional investors hesitate to expose how much they trade on a trading dapp like Uniswap, or how often they invest & borrow on a lending dapp like Compound.

We’re focused on building incognito mode for existing smart contracts on other cryptonetworks.

Initiative 4: Bring the best privacy research results to production

Instead of reinventing the wheel, our strategy is to bring the best privacy research results to production. The Incognito privacy stack borrows heavily from the research work of CryptoNote (RingCT), Dan Boneh (BLS), and Benedikt Bunz (Bulletproofs).

We’re also focused on solving privacy problems that are unique to Incognito, such as Confidential Assets.

Objective 4.2: Solve Incognito’s unique problems

Date

Status

ZKP on Mobile

Nov 2019

Shipped

Confidential Assets

Jan 2021

Building

Initiative 5: Be the highest-performance privacy cryptonetwork.

To deliver privacy at scale, we implement sharding on privacy transactions and a new consensus based on proof-of-stake, pBFT, and BLS. Transaction throughput scales out linearly with the number of shards.

3 We originally anticipated that we could remove the fixed nodes within 3-6 months of minimum viable mainnet launch. This is now delayed until April 2021. The main dependencies are Consensus v2 (Nov 2020), Dynamic Committee Size (Dec 2020), and Randomness v2 (Apr 2021). Without these components in place, there is a huge risk to network stability.

Initiative 6: Build a universal privacy wallet

We’re focused on building a universal privacy wallet that is safe (innovative key backup solutions), smart (seamless integration with different cryptoservices), and private – of course.

Conclusion

This 2020 roadmap is a small sampling of all the possibilities available to those who want to explore Incognito’s potential and help build out the network. The core dev team chose these initiatives to give Incognito its best shot at providing privacy that is not just technically robust, but also open-minded, inclusive, and far-reaching. Privacy that anyone, any currency, and any application can have. Join us in building this choice for the world.

To my experience while introducing Incognito to someone, the lack of two features in the wallet really makes the novice users surprised:
1- Not able to see receiving TXs
2- If the app is uninstalled somehow, she cannot access her previous transactions after she reinstalls it.

Related to 2, another feature restricting the users is that she cannot use readonly key via incognito explorer. I think if they cannot be implemented simultaneously because of workload, one of this or 2 should be implemented. Please remember that we call blockchain as distributed “ledger” frequently. Currently, ledger function is not easily accessible for Incognito users.

We originally anticipated that we could remove the fixed nodes within 3-6 months of minimum viable mainnet launch. This is now delayed until April 2021. The main dependencies are Consensus v2 (Nov 2020), Dynamic Committee Size (Dec 2020), and Randomness v2 (Apr 2021). Without these components in place, there is a huge risk to network stability.

According the committee page on the mainnet explorer, there are about ~915 (waiting + preparing + 80 community slots) non-Incognito team nodes. This does not include any nodes that are online but not staked or nodes that are otherwise offline.

The pNode is the Incognito implementation of a vNode device.
Everyone can bring their own version of a pNode, with their own logic, own staking mechanism, to the market. The pNode is just one way of doing it. Would be exciting to see what others come up with.

hey @abduraman… just want to make sure i understand exactly what you’re asking… what exactly (which components) of node are you asking to be open-source? the main part is already open-sourced, as node is basically a… computer running a full node just like how you’re running it on your vps.

hey @duy . As of now, I have no concern on this issue (otherwise I wouldn’t apply for Incognito Rebel position ) but some people will have. Why? Nobody can know whether a random node is vnode or pnode. What if pnodes have 2/3 of the network? In that case, how will people be sure whether the company of pnodes doesn’t go rouge? Of course, you may open some code as the source code of pNode but in truth, you may install a different node software not built upon the open source code. Anyway, in short, my question was just a suggestion, not a concern. Best.